Briarlea Bouviers: Farm Dogs

We have always gotten great pleasure by having our dogs help with farm chores. We use Lark to guard gates, to help move the sheep from one pasture to another, to put them in the barn for worming and foot trimming and finally, to load them into stock trailers for shipping to market in the fall. Often when we lamb in the spring, there will be a straggler ewe who decides to keep her lamb way off in the corner of the pasture. Here is where a good comes in handy in a very practical way ~ to help bring that single mom back up to the barnyard.

We also count on Lark to help protect us from the rams during breeding season. There is nothing wonderful about a ram deciding that the human is competition. Having Lark with me keeps the ram at bay.

We feel that dogs that are given responsibility are going to be happier. In the shoulder seasons of spring and fall sometimes the dogs haul hay out to the field. This way the sheep and goats are away from the barns for a longer time. In the winter we have so much snow that they feed close in. Sometimes we take the dogs into town for holiday events. This is always great fun for them!

Life on the little farm in Beaver Valley. These pictures were taken at home. Our farmhouse was built in 1860 by lumbermen who logged off the large white pines here in the valley. We live in the '57 Hills' limestone area of western Wisconsin.